By artarmon42 | No Comments
Last updated: Thursday, March 29, 2007

If you haven’t heard by now, there’s a new search engine that’s getting abit of press. ChaCha Serach, is one of the newer and more popular kids of the block. The catch-cry is that the searches are powered by humans!

Basically it’s like a normal search engine (presumably using google-like relevance ranking) but after you get the results, you have an option of asking a “guide” for help. Which, then spawns a chat-window and the human-expert helps you find the answer you need. Further details of how the guide system works can be found here.

There are invitations floating around the Internet, for people to sign up as a guide. I don’t have the details, but I’m led to believe that guides do the work out of the goodness of their hearts (i.e. they don’t get paid) and can do it on their own schedule (which presumably means there’s alot of guides for each topic to ensure adequate coverage). I haven’t actually used the ChaCha guide system yet… I feel guilty to call them up just so that I can “test their value”.

For the record, most people are classifying ChaCha as a Web 2.0 Search Engine. Although, going back to human help would seem to make it a Web 0.5 Search Engine

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